This Essay builds on prior work examining the role the law plays in fostering or discouraging nurturing relationships between fathers and children. In Beyond Economic Fatherhood: Encouraging Divorced Fathers to Parent, 153 U. Pa. L. Rev. 921 (2005), I used social norms theory to explore how the...

American law and culture have always assumed that providing for children economically is a private obligation, ordinarily belonging to the parents. The principal was given real teeth in 1975, when Congress enacted the federal-state child support enforcement program. The legislation's two related...

Increasing the probability of paying child support, in addition to increasing resources available for investment in children, may also alter the incentives faced by men to have children out of wedlock. We find that strengthening child support enforcement leads men to have fewer out-of-wedlock...